This was a surprise to me – and I thought it was both entertaining and very informational.
Whether you agree with everything that is said is a totally different matter. I would like to hear more about further revising the health care plan, which according to my favorite HR professional is a big pile of legislative crap that the business world doesn’t even know how to tackle. Maybe social security was met with the same revulsion as well, I can’t imagine that any employer enjoyed having to take over managing contributions to a government program. Frankly, there is one thing I’d like to hear about cap & trade on carbon – that it is going away. It sounds like a seriously complex solution to a very small subset of the problem.
It was nice to see the President articulate and nimble without a teleprompter, however. I’d always kind of wondered about that. It also served as a reminder how he had the charisma to get elected.
Finally, I thought the President very eloquently covered the topic of how people are going to be angry with the current situation in a America and how they will vent that through another change up, much like two years ago. It has been my position that during good economic times we tend to think our government is doing great – probably because they have their budgeted income or surplus to look good. During downturns, the guys in office are going to look horrible, running huge deficits or cutting into programs that are politically expensive.
Let’s all hope he’s right in stating that the elected representation, himself included, is willing to make the “right” decisions versus the ones that are popular. The sad truth of the matter is that their job depends on making the popular ones and like the vast majority of working America keeping their job is of top priority for a variety of very common human factors.
Two years ago I am sure that many Republicans were voted out of office simply because of their party affiliation rather than their past performance. I have little doubt we’ll see a few Democrats bounced out this year for the same reason. Given a rational debate, I believe that most would agree that we should, instead, focus on keeping the intelligent and level headed representatives in office. What is very unclear is how we get from where we are to there.
–Nat